Vicki Kirby is a Professor Emerita in the Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and a Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Art and Architecture, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. The motivating question behind her research is the puzzle of the nature/culture division because so many political and ethical decisions are configured in terms of this opposition. She is also interested in “the language question” – what is language, and how does the way we answer that question define the human and inaugurate the political? Books include What If Culture Was Nature All Along? (Edinburgh); Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Duke); Judith Butler: Live Theory (Bloomsbury) and Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (Routledge). She is a member of the Terra Critica international think tank and currently holds a Peek Grant through the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna that will bring research in human cognition into conversation with plant sciences.